


from the noise

by shecrows



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: M/M, sad bastard warrior hawke
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-12
Updated: 2015-05-12
Packaged: 2018-03-30 06:59:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3927217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shecrows/pseuds/shecrows
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I have few friends, Hawke. Fewer still whom I would counsel, for I’ve no gift for it. But I have always felt, with you – it is different.” The line of his mouth wavers, then turns down. “Allow me this.”</p><p>Hawke looks him in the eye. “I have,” he says, and there is weight behind it.</p><p>(Set in game, during Act 2, sometime after “A Bitter Pill.”)</p>
            </blockquote>





	from the noise

**Author's Note:**

> this is not real world burns first aid 101. as someone who will soon be doing this for a living (medical things, not writing about sad wretches with feelings), i feel compelled to say that. but, like, dragon age rules, right? as far as i can tell you can be bleeding anywhere from your eyeballs to internally, and an injury kit will clear that shit right up, somehow, so! liberties have been taken.
> 
> anyway, this sliver of a fic happened because i’m regrettably taken with sad bastard warrior hawke. i wouldn’t be at all surprised if i end up writing more of him.

Tonight's captive audience is more drunk than sober, which is usual, and quiet in their attentions, which is not. Varric presides over them, his stolen court, with an air of benevolent magnanimity, the unquestionable centerpiece of a sea of heads over which he seems, somehow, the taller.

Even tucked away in a corner of the tavern, Hawke knows he is unmistakable; it’s spelled out in the wide berth he receives, the open looks he doesn't. Only Varric meets his eyes every so often in the low light, stroking the underside of his jaw with broad, flat fingers as he pretends to search for the right words, or waits for the earlier words to hit their mark. It has the effect of the moon on the tides, his audience shifting inexorably as one, ever so slightly forward toward the sound of his voice, then ever so slightly back.

There'd been a time when one stern look from Hawke would have silenced these ceaseless ramblings  -- at least, the puckish glint in Varric's eyes promised, until Hawke was out of earshot.

He supposes the dwarf is learning him. It grates less than it should.

"You never did tell us much about the Deep Roads," Isabela says, her arrival as sudden as it is silent.

She leans over his shoulder to swap out his nearly drained tankard for a full one. Hawke stops her with a heavy, gauntleted hand on her wrist, giving one mute shake of his head.

"Suit yourself," she says breezily, and folds into the seat beside him, uncaring of her welcome. The drink winds up in the possessive circle of her arm, dark, elegant fingers playing lightly over its handle. "But really. The uptight, priggish one's been mum on the subject for going on three years," _in deference to you_ , she doesn't say, though her shrewd look conveys the message, "and Varric... editorializes."

"Yes," Hawke says, eyes flicking over to him once more. "He does."

The retelling is grandiose in the way Varric always makes them sound, the stakes higher, the rewards bigger, the hero somehow more and less than himself. The violence is theatrical, but cleaner. It has a beginning and an end to it, a laying down of sword and shield and battle axe. It certainly isn't something the hero carries inside of him, leaving its mark on everything that gets close and, when the time comes for it to count, falling wretchedly short.

That's not the version anyone wants to believe.

"Oh, don't look so glum." Her sharp eyes shine warmly, the blade's edge in them blunted but never gone entirely. Hawke lingers there. "I know when to stop prying."

She tilts her raised cup toward him the way one might tip a hat, all playful emphasis. The drink, Hawke notes, is half gone.

He raises one eyebrow. "I'll wager you spend more on spirits than clean beds."

"You think I pay for these?" she asks, words buoyed by a swell of suppressed laughter.

Hawke's lips twitch, very faintly, in response.

 

+

 

Outside it smells like rain. It hardly ever seems to rain in Kirkwall, which alone might explain the dearth of green in the city, the sheer overabundance of unyielding stone. Apart from the towering tree in the alienage, which the elves painstakingly maintain, and the neatly kept hedges of Hightown, which probably cost a fortune, little seems to grow.

Bethany used to comment on it, speaking wistfully of the wilds surrounding Lothering, the sprawling fields and hidden streams. Thinking of her is an ache he is getting better at bearing, a weighted failure he is learning how to move against. It helps not to think of her face at the end, or what could have been the end, pleading turned to hopelessness as he did what should have been impossible, trusted her fate to the hands of strangers under Anders’s pained and watchful gaze.

The letter she sent, some months ago, is in a drawer in his room under lock and key, the only one Isabela leaves alone. He takes it out sometimes, not to read but to have close, tries not to think about everything to which he’s condemned her simply because he couldn’t bear to lose her, too.

_That’s my life now: survival, getting through each day. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?_

It sits there, a heavy, roiling sickness in Hawke’s gut, until a figure stirs somewhere in the dark, and Hawke stills, straightens, pushes it down. He scans the street to pinpoint the source of the movement, no stranger to spilling blood under the forgiving cloak of night only to find the bodies gone by morning, as though the stone itself had swallowed them.

Clouds shift overhead in the space between breaths, displacing shadows. Silver-white hair catches moonlight, gives back more of the same.

Fenris.

He moves with all the bearing of the hunted, in turns smooth and fitful but never graceless, inaudible footfalls so unlike those of a warrior, inarguably though he is. He's watching Hawke the way he watches everything – guarded, in the shroud between fight and flight, poised for either. The former, Fenris would say, with pretty words about tigers at his silent heels, but Hawke remembers the bend of his spine bathed in firelight, the string of bruises bitten into flesh, Fenris arching up into each in welcome but leaving none and, in the still hour before dawn, simply leaving.

"What are you doing here?" Hawke asks.

It's a fair question. Slinking around the city at night isn't, as far as he knows, high on the elf's itinerary unless Hawke asks it of him, and he's tried not to, lately. No matter the time of day or night, Fenris seems determined to stay holed up in that decrepit, hollowed-out skeleton of a mansion, both eyes on the door, braced for an attack that never comes.

There's no peace in him. That shouldn't be a balm, and it isn't, but something in Hawke turns over at the knowledge, bares its belly, recognizing its own.

The corner of Fenris's mouth hitches up, sharp but not unkind. His eyes, when Hawke meets them, are softer than Hawke expects. "Are you my keeper, Hawke?"

 _Maker, I hope not_ , Hawke thinks, and feels very tired, and says nothing.

Fenris frowns and steps closer, then hesitates. “You were not at the estate.”

“Are you my keeper, Fenris?” he echoes, trying for a quirk of lips, but the shape of his mouth feels stiff, unyielding, and Fenris’s frown deepens, which is not what Hawke meant to do at all.

For the first time, Fenris looks uncomfortable, shifting his weight in a way that’s less like fidgeting and more like defense. It makes Hawke feel wretched, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. Fenris isn’t quite looking at him, gaze askew over Hawke’s armored shoulder, and that’s a defense, too.

 _Am I really so fearsome_ , Hawke thinks, flat, false humor that sours in the back of his throat, and because Bethany is on his mind tonight it’s her voice that answers, low and amused and so fond it’s painful. _Terrifying_ , it says, a wealth of laughter in a single word. He can almost feel the familiar scritch of her nails against the roughness of his beard, touching him without hesitation.

“Have I caused offense?” Fenris asks.

Hawke blinks, jolted. “It was a joke,” he says, wondering if he’s really so out of practice.

“That is not – “ Fenris exhales roughly. “I meant – we have not spoken since.” Since when, he doesn’t need to say, and won’t, it seems, the thought of it too distasteful to linger upon. “And I thought, perhaps.”

“I thought it would be best,” Hawke says, steeling himself. “I thought that’s what you wanted.”

And now he does look at Hawke, sudden and fierce, eyes an open challenge. “Do not presume to know what I want,” he says, voice slicing through the moonlit dark. “If I wished you gone, I would have said so.” He blinks, gaze softening but only just, defiance still threatening below the surface like the rumbling of an oncoming storm. “I do not wish it.”

 _Then what_ do _you want_ , Hawke thinks with something more desperate than anger, and wearier, too. He feels rough all over with the not knowing, clumsy and graceless, and if he looked at Fenris’s gauntlet he would see the torn bit of red silk robe wrapped around black steel like a brand. A deliberate marking. A message, clear as blighted mud.

He _could_ look, could reach out and touch it, a question.

He doesn’t.

“Walk with me,” he says instead, a short, sharp scrape of demand, because he doesn’t know what else to do.

Fenris stares at him, then nods. Hawke’s breath gentles with the gesture, eases even further when he starts down the dim, dark street, and Fenris falls into step beside him.

+

They make it to Hightown before they’re attacked, swords drawn before Hawke can even tell who it is they’re fighting.

Years of habit allow them to move as a single unit, one dark and the other lyrium-bright, and Fenris is faster so it’s he who spills first blood, broad blade gutting a man from throat to belly as Hawke tears through a group of three coming up on Fenris’s flank. Archers on stone steps rain arrows down on them, and Hawke blocks each, one-two-three, with the flat of his sword, turns his blade and dispatches them with the sharpened edge.

It’s bloody and quick and so very, very easy, the roar of blood in his ears a familiar backdrop that shouldn’t center him but does. Here he is more and somehow less than himself, a means to an end, and everything else is cold silence and colder steel and a string of cooling bodies.

More attackers come, seeming to crawl out of the stonework itself, alighting from ledges and charging from dark, hidden passageways over which Hawke’s eyes had skipped before. They swarm Fenris like ants and Hawke charges, spills blood in wide, messy arcs, one heavy blow to each of Fenris’s three. He registers, dimly, that some of the blood is Fenris’s, but the elf moves with the same lethal grace as ever, yells, “ _Hawke_!” in warning as a rogue uncloaks behind him, daggers raised and glinting, and Hawke doesn’t think of it again.

By the time he sees the mage, it’s too late.

Fenris staggers, then falls.

Hawke’s vision narrows to the awkward splay of limbs, smoking feebly from bearing the brunt of the mage’s Fireball, impossibly small against the stone.

Then he roars, throat scraped raw with the sound, and charges the mage with everything he has.

 _He’s dead_ , a dull voice points out some time after he is, the mage’s mangled corpse lying in irrefutable proof at his feet, and _you can stop_ , but Hawke doesn’t, not because he can’t but because he doesn’t want to, sword a solid imperative in his hands. And then _Fenris_ , and he falters, delivering one final, uneven blow, awareness of the outside world returning like feeling to a limb gone numb.

Hawke straps the sword to his back without wiping the blood off first, strides over and hauls Fenris up, slinging the elf’s arm over the broad span of Hawke’s shoulders. It earns him a low gasp of pain, and his heart twists; he ignores it with the ease of long practice.

“Can you walk like this?” Hawke asks over the sound of labored breathing.

The muscles of Fenris’s jaw work as he grits his teeth. “A moment.”

Hawke waits, his entire body angled to create a safe space for Fenris to rally his strength. Fenris leans into him unselfconsciously, or perhaps that’s a testament to how badly hurt he is. Soft hair tickles Hawke’s nose. Hawke turns his face away lest he do something senseless like breathe him in.

Fenris nods. “All right.”

“All right,” Hawke repeats. “Lean on me,” and Fenris huffs something that could be a laugh but dissolves into a hiss as they move.

Hawke steers them east, toward the hidden stairs that lead down into the sewers. Fenris is a warm weight against him, light enough that Hawke could carry him easily were it not for the flat, furious protest he’d probably receive if he tried. He very nearly smiles at the image, Fenris’s eyes alight with indignation even wounded as he is, demanding in no uncertain terms to be returned to the ground.

Fenris’s step suddenly fumbles, brows hitching. He turns his head, breath warm against Hawke’s neck. “Where are we going?”

“Darktown,” Hawke says shortly.

Fenris stops walking altogether, turns abruptly into dead weight, so much heavier than he looks. Hawke drags him for a step or two before the elf growls and plants his heels on the ground, pulls them to a halt. “No.”

“Fenris, you’re hurt. Badly.”

“Not _him_ ,” he says, snarling the last as one would _it_ , managing hate where Hawke can’t, anymore. Not since – but it doesn’t matter now, because Fenris is pulling away, and Hawke wouldn’t put it past him to attempt the stubborn trek on his own, injuries and moonlit attackers be damned.

“ _Fenris_ ,” Hawke says, exasperated.

“You have an injury kit in your belt, do you not?” Fenris snaps, swaying into the bulk of Hawke’s body as though he can’t quite argue and stay upright at the same time. “And the mansion is not far.” Always _the mansion_ , never a hint of possession. Then suddenly he tenses, expression going pinched and unhappy before smoothing out into a mask that gives away nothing at all. “Though I would – understand if you would rather not – “

He leaves the thought hanging, unfinished. If Hawke would rather not what? Help him? Touch him? The assortment of salves and tinctures is a well-known one, the process innately familiar. Hawke is admittedly more used to being on the receiving end, his body a tableau of accumulated scars where the healing fell short, but it’s nothing he hasn’t had to do before when pressed.

Hawke makes a rough sound in the back of his throat, hefts Fenris closer.

“Come on,” he says, and turns them in the opposite direction.

 

+

 

He doesn’t try to make it to the stairs. Instead he veers them toward the hobbled little kitchen quarters at the west end of the mansion, finds a lamp with scarcely enough oil in it to be of use and lowers Fenris into a chair as carefully as he knows how. In the warm wash of light he can see where the smooth leather of his tunic has been torn and shredded, just below the dull metal of his chest plate, which bears scorch marks.

“Here,” Hawke says, handing him a healing draught. He waits for Fenris to drink it down before reaching for the buckle of his belt, and pauses. Something like sense memory stays his hand, fingertips barely brushing it as he swallows, feels compelled to ask. “Can I – “

A flicker of a smile chases inexplicably over Fenris’s mouth in counterpoint to the careful stillness of the rest of him, then disappears. “You can.” He undoes the leather strap one-handed. “Though I am not so incapacitated that I cannot help also.”

Hawke slides the belt away from his hips, sets it aside and starts in on the dark loops of string tying the leather vest together, pausing to unbuckle the straps on his chest plate, lifting it up and away. He remembers making it this far before Fenris took over, on the night that – well. He hovers over the rest of it, uncertain.

“Let me,” Fenris says. He sheds both gauntlets to reveal the interconnected straps of leather underneath, looping around his elbows and up to the spiky black pauldrons decorating his shoulders. Those fall away with a flick of his wrist, sweat gathering on his brow with the way he has to twist to reach them, the pull on injured muscles making his breaths come shallower.

The long vest is easy enough to peel away once the last of the ties are undone, baring Fenris down to the waistband of his trousers, lines of lyrium criss-crossing warm brown skin, over his ribs and into –

 _Maker_.

It isn’t half as bad as the worst Hawke’s ever seen, but neither is the sight a pleasant one. The scorch marks on Fenris’s chest plate make an ugly kind of sense when he takes in the peeling skin and blistering flesh, the damage extending over and onto his back, nearly to the muscle.

He grunts, an unhappy sound. “This would heal easier with – “

“Hawke,” growls Fenris in warning.

Hawke glares at him. “It will scar.”

Fenris actually snorts, damn him, then immediately winces. “I will bear it.”

Hawke dumps the contents of the injury kit on the table, reaches for the salve so roughly he almost knocks it down. Of all the injuries he’s ever had to deal with, Hawke hates burns the most. The smell alone. A soldier at Ostagar lost half his face to them and remained quick to smile in spite of it, joking that at least they’d spared his best side. He died five days later from a darkspawn javelin through the throat. Hawke doesn’t remember his name.

The salve tingles as he scoops it onto his fingers. It’s the embrium, he thinks, that makes it do this, though it’s been years since his last lesson. His eyes slide up to Fenris’s face as he kneels, anchors himself with one hand on Fenris’s unhurt side, spanning over the curve of his hip.

Fenris nods without looking at him, chin tilting downward, the slightest inclination.

Hawke’s touch is ungentle, clumsy in its attempts to be otherwise. He spreads the salve along the edges of the wound, ignoring the grimace that almost immediately pulls at Fenris’s otherwise stoic features. It would probably be just as well if he got it over with as quickly and efficiently as possible, but he’s barely resolved to it when Fenris makes a low sound of pain that buries itself beneath Hawke’s ribs like a particularly cruel blade.

He stops for a moment, hands still and useless, squares his jaw. Then he resumes the work in silence, bracketed by the warmth of Fenris’s legs.

He works his way over the damage, careful of the blisters, divides the wound into a grid-like area in his mind and applies the salve evenly to each imaginary square. Fenris no longer makes involuntary noises that register discomfort, but Hawke can see it in the tensing of his muscles, in the way he braces against it, against him.

“I’m sorry.” The terse apology is out of Hawke’s mouth before he can wrangle it into silence. He forges on with the task, tries to move slower, for all the good it does. “I’ve no talent for this.”

“You, with all your years of soldiering and wounds.” Fenris sounds amused.

The salve does its work quickly. Even now the areas of least damage are beginning to knit themselves together, burned flesh renewing itself and giving way to raw, rosy patches of new growth. Hawke reaches for the jar again, spreads more of the stuff onto his fingers, tries not to think about anything else even as the words leave his mouth. “Bethany was always – “ Her name catches in his throat, painful. It’s rawer tonight than most nights, closer to the surface instead of safely if inelegantly buried. He blames Varric and his insipid storytelling. “This was her area, not mine.”

“Ah.” Fenris dips his head. Hawke can feel his eyes on him, resolutely doesn’t look back lest he find pity there. But when Fenris speaks, there’s nothing like it in his voice, and Hawke marginally relaxes. “I am sorry for what happened. I never said. Bethany was – “

“Is,” Hawke corrects, rough like his hands.

“Is,” Fenris softly allows. “And yet you grieve her.”

“I grieve them all.” The words are too raw, too honest, and he never talks like this so there’s little in the way of warning before something in his chest bows and loosens like a floodgate giving way. He moves both hands away from Fenris’s body before the rush of it can claim him, turn his touch violent, and fists them safely against his knees, beneath the drawn down hunch of his shoulders. “Or would you think otherwise, of someone like me.”

Now Fenris does make a noise, if only a small one. “I do not think there are any like you.”

Hawke huffs a breath that’s all dark humor, and waits. The ache dulls. His hands slowly, slowly unclench. Fenris is still throughout it all, silent as a sentry, breaths slow and even in spite of the painful ugliness Hawke has left half tended.

“I know I can be – severe.” Hawke frowns to himself, brows drawn together.

“But not cold,” Fenris says. Something in his voice makes Hawke look up, bare himself to the weight of that steady, searching gaze, so often inscrutable. There’s warmth there now, softening the green, banked instead of blazing. It could be the light. “And your heart is not stone. You would not look so if it were.”

Hawke sighs and reaches for him again, slow and careful, eyes centered on his task. He shifts a little to one side in order to see to the damage on Fenris’s back, keeps his voice as light as he can manage. “Which is?”

“As though it were breaking.”

Hawke pauses, gaze heavy on Fenris’s back, the curve of his shoulder limned in warm light. His tongue feels thick and clumsy, so he speaks around it. “You can break stone, Fenris.”

“Yes.” Fenris turns his head a fraction, toward him. “But it does not hurt the stone.”

The weighted knot in Hawke’s belly twitches, as though someone has found an end and pulled.

“Enough,” he says, flat and firm, fingers tracing slow, even circles over the broken parts of Fenris’s flesh.

Out of the corner of his eye, Hawke watches the slow turn of the jar in Fenris’s hand, the uncharacteristic idleness of the movement. The wound will need bandages even after the salve has done its work, for a day or two at least. And it _will_ scar, Hawke thinks darkly, sure of it now, though a tincture of elfroot and spindleweed might curtail the worst of it. He could ask Anders, who surely has mixtures up his sleeve Hawke’s never even heard of, but Fenris is suspicious at the best of times, and would probably guess.

Fenris, who is looking at him sidelong and careful, a backwards kind of careful, as though Hawke is the one he’s worried about hurting. The absurdity of it nearly makes Hawke’s hands tremble.

“I have few friends, Hawke. Fewer still whom I would counsel, for I’ve no gift for it. But I have always felt, with you – it is different.” The line of his mouth wavers, then turns down. “Allow me this.”

Hawke looks him in the eye. “I have,” he says, and there is weight behind it. He wipes his hand against the flagstones. “I’m going to scrounge up some bandages.”

“The east-most room on the second floor,” Fenris says, voice following him as he leaves.

What he finds is barely salvageable, a handful of sheet and curtain that he shreds until only the cleanest parts are left. Almost everything in the mansion is the same as it was over three years ago, notable exceptions being the layers of dust that have only grown in thickness, the grime on the windows that renders them nearly opaque. Fenris hunches over the place like a dog with a bone but touches nothing. Hawke doesn’t ask why. Probably he doesn’t need to. But maybe, one day, he should.

When Hawke returns, Fenris has moved from the chair to the very edge of the table. The stiffness with which he’d held himself before has bled into something less so. A second empty bottle of healing draught stands next to the first, and Hawke’s mouth twitches sourly, cursing the damned elf’s stubbornness.

“Thank you, Hawke.” Green eyes glint at him like jewels in the dark, soft and unguarded.

It brings Hawke up short for a moment, hands fisting in the makeshift bandages. Sense memory again, perhaps, recalling the only other time Fenris has looked at him quite like that. Honest and open, without edges, inviting touch.

Hawke frowns, tosses the fabric onto the vacated chair with undue force. “Don’t thank me yet.”

The salve has dried, absorbed into the flesh as it should. Hawke eyes his work critically; inexpert though it is, it will serve. He has a hand braced over Fenris’s ribs before he can think twice about it, accustomed already to being allowed. The uncertainty grates, the boundaries here all of Fenris’s making, Hawke learning them as he goes. But Fenris says nothing, only peers at him with those same damned eyes, chest rising and falling under Hawke’s hand. If Hawke thinks he feels the breath catch, he writes it off as imagination.

“I’ll leave a few tinctures,” Hawke says. He shakes out a bandage, wraps it loosely around Fenris’s torso, then another. He has to lean close enough to smell the sweat on Fenris’s neck to do it. “Might help with the scarring.”

This time it’s Fenris who reaches out and touches him, warm against his wrist, and Hawke flinches because hardly anyone ever does.

 _What do you_ want _,_ Hawke thinks again, tempted to get it out of him in bloody writing, and, “ _Fenris_ ,” he says, the word mangled by frustration, a joyless sound.

Fenris takes his hand back, looks wretched and – guilty? Hawke doesn’t know whether to laugh or break something. Preferably not the slip of injured elf in front of him, already the worse for wear. He heaves a giant breath out through his nose, moves away and braces both hands on the table in front of him. The pile of Fenris’s armor lies within easy reach.

Hawke slides one hand toward it, deliberately grazing the red silk on Fenris’s gauntlet with the tips of his fingers.

“Would you wish it gone?” Fenris asks, voice heavy with something like sadness.

_Allow me this._

Hawke reaches for anger and, oddly, finds none.

“Do as you like,” he says tonelessly, pushing off from the table.

He doesn’t look at Fenris, doesn’t look back, when he leaves.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on [tumblr](http://leighway.tumblr.com/).


End file.
